is there an eco in here?

Let us swear. Anathema on the Da Vinci Code! On The Course in Miracles! On Oprah and Chopra and Marianne Williamson! In this Great Work I bow to the one who has traversed these shadowed paths and mysteries far longer and deeper than I ever will (gods willing) if I live another thousand years. I bow to the superior wisdom of the True Magus... Then Bramanti said: "Brothers, we are gathered here in the name of the One Order, the Unknown Order, to which Order, until yesterday, you did not know that you belonged, and yet you have always belonged to it! Let us swear. Anathema on all profaners of the Secret. Anathema on all sycophants of the occult. Anathema on all those who have made a spectacle of the Rites and Mysteries!" "Anathema!" "Anathema on the Invisible College, on the bastard children of Hiram and the Widow, on the operative and speculative masters of the lie of the Orient and the Occident, Ancient, Accepted, or Revised, on Mizraim and Memphis, on the Philalethes and the Nine Sisters, on the Strict Observance and on the Ordo Templi Orientis, on the Illuminati of Bavaria and of Avignon, on the Elus Cohen, on the Perfect Friendship, on the Knights of the Black Eagle and of the Holy City, on the Rosicrucians of Anglia, on the cabalists of the Rose + Cross of Gold, on the Catholic Rosy Cross of the Temple and of the Grail, on the Stella Matutina, on the Astrum Argentinum and Thelema, on Vril and Thule, on every ancient and mystical usurper of the name of the Great White Fraternity, on the Guardians of the Temple, on every college and priory of Zion and of Gaul!" "Anathema!" "Whoever out of ingenuity, submission, conversion, calculation, or bad faith has been initiated into any lodge, college, priory, chapter, or order that illicitly refers to obedience to the Unknown Superiors or to the Masters of the World, must this night abjure that initiation and implore total restoration in spirit and body to the one and true observance, the Tres, Templi Resurgentes Equites Synarchici, the triune and and trinosophic mystical and most secret order of the Synarchic Knights of Templar Rebirth!" "Sub umbra alarum tuarum!" "Now enter the dignitaries of the thirty-six highest and most secret degrees." As Bramanti called the elect, they appeared in liturgical vestments, wearing the insigne of the Golden Fleece on their chest... ~ from Foucault's Pendulum Umberto Eco, p. 482-3 Umberto, I love you. Even though I only spoke to you that one time from the CMU Robotics Institute by accidentally calling your fax machine on their dime using the number my sister gave me (who knows where she got it), but you didn't know who was calling. "Hello? Hello?" you said. However, I love you nonetheless. With these words of deep learning and craft, once again you have restored my sense of balance (and humor), thus rescuing me -- I have no doubt of this whatsoever -- from a terrible and devastating madness.

for the chapter: The Usual Suspects

The Teacher brought the new Student to the Principal. She inquired, "At which level should he start?"

The Principal examined the Student for a few moments and then asked, "Why did you come to this school?"

The Student replied, "To learn the art of happiness."

The Principal turned to the Teacher and said, "Level 1." He smiled, looking at the Student.

"Now go to your classroom."

??? Shortcut to Spirituality: Mastering the Art of Inner Peace ???

"...it is here that the story touches on the strange history of Rennes-le-Chateau. Henry Lincoln has argued that the order of the Priory of Sion, which was founded at the end of the first Crusade by Hugh de Payen and his knights, actually dates back many centuries through the dynasty known as the Merovingians..."

The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved
The Holy Shroud of Turin, p. 202
Colin Wilson

who's afraid of virginia woolf?

		for the chapter: Fascist Modernism: Double Vision
Did the invention of interchangeable parts, a prerequisite of the Industrial Revolution, influence the Zeitgeist of the mid-19th century and how it tried to grapple with Darwin's notion of fitness? What Darwin meant by "survival of the fittest" was that the probability of an organism's evolutionary advance was greatly increased if it found an environmental opportunity it could exploit to advantage. Although the concept of ecological niches is fairly commonplace today, it was a difficult idea to grasp in 1859 when The Origin of Species was first published. Far more familiar, even at the dawn of early industrialism, was the idea of parts that "fit" their intended application. Evolutionary "fitness" thus came to be seen as a match against a preexisting norm or ideal -- an archetype, one might almost say. As a result of this Social Darwinism, eugenics came to be widely adopted as a response to a felt need for "race improvement" toward such an ideal type of human being. Those falling short of these metrics of worth, or unworthiness to live, were not only dispensable, but a positive danger to (read here: Anglo-Saxon) society. Is a picture beginning to emerge? The introductory passage below is from A Concise Companion to Modernism by David Bradshaw (p. 49). ...there is one passage in her diary which has caused considerable consternation and which is not remotely ironic. On January 9, 1915 Woolf and her husband went for a stroll by the River Thames between Richmond and Kingston: On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look at twice, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; & then one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead , or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.		the origin of species A Social History of Industrial Automation
The quote is from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I: 1915-1919, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (p. 13). Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration goes into much greater depth on these issues. That art and literature in the era of modernism was deeply bound up with eugenics -- and the eugenic "solutions" it led to -- seems to be well known in certain quarters of the academy, and largely unknown elsewhere. As the academy is where the problem largely began, there's an outside chance these ideas might be worthy of more than passing intellectual curiosity. Call it a wild hunch.		Modernism and Eugenics we are not amused

technology and superstition

Proving that you don't need to be into angels or astrology to be a modern-day druid, Ray Kurzweil weighs in again on his favorite subject. The volume below is a sequel to his 1999 bestseller, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. Here's how the new one -- Are We Spiritual Machines? -- describes itself. Computers are becoming more powerful at an ever-increasing rate, but will they ever become conscious? Artificial intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil thinks so and explains how we will "download" our software (our minds) and "upgrade" our hardware (our bodies) to become immortal -- before the dawn of the 22nd century. Juxtaposed below against this purported 21st century "science" are some of the superstitions it was supposed to save us from, and conversely, which hope to save us from the retrograde views of Western Science (not to be confused with chili cook-offs and bull roping). The following are the subcategories Amazon lists in its New Age section. Before we can talk about the NewAge++ superset, we need at least some vague (and they are) conceptual boundaries around the plain old garden variety New Age. General Astrology Chakras Channeling Divination Dreams Meditation Mental & Spiritual Healing Mysticism New Age Biographies & Memoirs New Thought Reference Reincarnation Self-Help Theosophy Urantia Visionary Fiction There's something more than a little fishy going on here. All this incorrigible blather is pandering to the wildest hopes and darkest fears of a people running on empty, running scared. But ah well, you know what they say. Markets are conversations... The following are a few of the core resources that have been helpful in sorting out how all this spooky bamboozlement got going in the first place, and how it has played out into the 20th century. You can search inside both at Amazon by clicking the images.		for the chapter: NewAge++ images of the [story mafia] non-machines above are from exactitudes, an amazing book and perhaps even more amazing website
		British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern
		20th century developments a companion volume The Occult Establishment covers the 19th

NewAge++

Few people self-identify as New Age. The category is relegated to crystal gazers and the tinfoil-hat crowd, which can be safely despised for their uncritical credulity by the more sophisticated, who swing for the higher branches -- like "quantum" manipulation of their own DNA, and other "spiritual" sports of nature. We need a more broadly inclusive category than the aging "New Age." Whatever it is, the related but hardly identical phenomenon I'm calling NewAge++ (with a tip o' the hat to software nomenclature) is proving its appeal (and market muscle) by proliferating like kudzu across bookstore shelf space: Self-Help, Relationships, Recovery, Psychology, Nature, Science, Philosophy -- in which last section is shelved this latest gem from Joseph Chilton Pearce, perhaps best known for smoking The Crack in the Cosmic Egg. The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit "...examines the current biological understanding of our neural organization to address how we can transcend our current evolutionary capacities and limitations." Transcend our evolutionary limitations, uh huh. Maybe we can grow ornithopter beanies! Sure cut down on the smog in LA. And while we're talking cars, what the hell, let's also talk about race and class. BMW Feng Shui is just not that big in the hood yet. It's still more of a Santeria/Voodoo thing with white Cadillac Escalades. But whether it involves money or the immaterial, NewAge++ is all about the power of spiritual bling. Fungible muy mojo gris-gris, babycakes. You in?		for the chapter: NewAge++ The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality: Searching for the Higher Self, 1875-1915 Spiritual, but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America

to die for

This is a book about love. About that of which it has been said: love is love and not fade away. A lmost of necessity, given the subject, it is also a book about narcissistic personality disorder and attachment theory. Freud wrote about narcissism in 1914. However, according to Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 8th edition, 2003), his ideas on the subject changed so radically over the ensuing decades that there is no coherent "Freudian" definition of narcissism. This fact has not, however, prevented the proliferation of one of the late 20th century's pet concepts: healthy narcissism. In its article on psychoanalysis, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism says of Norman O. Brown's book, Life Against Death (1959): "...the dual drives Freud postulated can themselves be subsumed into one unity; Brown interprets Freud's "oceanic feeling" -- from The Future of an Illusion (1928) -- to denote a desire for union between self and world that, once recovered, can heal the divisions created by repression."		for the chapter: No Love Lost - Sisyphus & Boulder
In contrast, Daniel Stern, one of the world's foremost child development researchers -- who worked with actual human beings, not just literary abstractions -- has this to say in The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology: This view [i.e., that of the book as a whole] places more emphasis on strategies and problems in attachment when viewing pathology, and it minimizes, even does away with, the need to conceptualize phases of "normal autism," "primary narcissism," and "symbiosis." Symbiosis is a codeword for Freud's (and thus N.O. Brown's) "oceanic feeling." The sub-rosa agenda by which all these nonexistent concepts continue to thrive despite lack of a lick of evidence is America's mania for self-esteem boosterism -- the notion that self-esteem is "secondary narcissism" and therefore equals a second-order nonexistent concept: "healthy narcissism." As Morris Eagle notes in Recent Developments in Psychoanalysis: A Critical Evaluation (1984), there is nothing remotely healthy about narcissism. Try this. Imagine looking into the eyes of a very beautiful plaster mannequin for whom you do not exist. Now you're beginning to get the picture... her voice was soft and cool / her eyes were clear and bright but she's not there... ~ zombies ~

table of contents

cluetrain stopping on an empty platform T his is the draft table of contents of my book-in-progress, annotated at a fairly bare-bones level. It will undoubtedly change as I get into writing the individual chapters. Some may get folded into others. Some may disappear altogether. So many chapters means either that each has to be pretty skinny, or that the book has to be pretty fat. The chapter titles will be linked to forthcoming blog posts on this site -- first to more fleshed-out versions of the notes you see below (i.e., as part of a formal book proposal), then to the actual chapters as they evolve. Stay tuned for... Numinous Lunacy & the Sanctimonious Narcissism of the NewAge++ I want to know what love is... foreigner Preface: Acknowledgments and Disclaimers Many people helped me to survive the experience this book attempts to capture and make sense of. I was not and am not an objective observer. Going back further, before writing books was even a remote fantasy, I participated in many of the beliefs and practices I critique here. It's possible that I'm just working off my <cough> karmic debt. No Love Lost - Sisyphus & Boulder NewAge++ The Usual Suspects Tracing the historical development of these strange beliefs began for me, as it would for many, in the '60s. Magical mystery tours of all sorts, psychedelics of every stripe, and of course tons of self-canonized psycho-spiritual gurus: Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, John Lilly, Oscar Ichazo, Claudio Naranjo, Werner Erhard, Fritz Perls, Stanislav Grof, Ken Wilber, Robert Bly, Marilyn Ferguson, Sam Keen, Jean Houston, Abraham Maslow... the list is endless. However, the New Age++ didn't begin in the 1960s. Hardly. To begin our backward reconnaissance, the next chapter focuses on the last individual in the above list: Abraham Maslow -- long before he ever hit Esalen. Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man by Sam Keen Manifest Destiny of the Third Kind The Great Awakenings The Puritans came to America with a sense of calling, of having been chosen for great things. Then things faltered a bit, spiritually speaking, until Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield kicked off The Great Awakening. Its effectiveness was indisputable; its excesses notable. A second round of evangelical Awakenings got started in New England in the 19th century. And then there was Tom Wolfe's essay on "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening," which, simply put, is about narcissism. And what will the Real Me be like? It is at this point that the new movements tend to take on a religious or spiritual atmosphere. In one form or another they arrive at an axiom first propounded by the Gnostic Christians some eighteen hundred years ago: namely, that at the apex of every human soul there exists a spark of the light of God. In most mortals that spark is "asleep" (the Gnostics' word), all but smothered by the facades and general falseness of society. But those souls who are clear can find that spark within themselves and unite their souls with God's. And with that conviction comes the second assumption: there is an other order that actually reigns supreme in the world. Like the light of God itself, this other order is invisible to most mortals. But he who has dug himself out from under the junk heap of civilization can discover it. And with that . . . the Me movements were about to turn righteous. The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening Tom Wolfe (1976) in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine Trance & Dentalism Transcendentalism was tangled up with the changes in American society leading to the Second Great Awakening. It's chief proponent was Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom a lot of people at the time thought was talking pure nonsense. In hindsight, we can appreciate that he was talking nonsense -- and a pernicious form of it. Emerson's best pal, Thomas Carlyle, wrote "Occasional Thoughts on the Nigger Problem," which even back then caused a few cases of apoplexy. The ever cryptic and often confused Ralph Waldo hawked "Self Reliance" and the "Oversoul" to a fledgling nation because... well, it's not entirely clear why. Something to do with a bad translation of the Bhagavad Gita and possibly one too many hits on the local hemp. "...this Transcendentalist approach to spirituality is a method that can be practiced by Christians, Buddhists, Taoists, Witches, and Religious Humanists alike, so it unifies us a Unitarian Universalists, even as we travel our own religious paths." Transcendentalism for the New Age Jane E. Rosecrans, Ph.D. A Sermon delivered at Unitarian Universalist Community Church Glen Allen, Virginia, February 6, 2005 Darwin's Monkey Wrench Seismic theological rumblings, tectonic cultural plate shifts. Social Darwinism and "scientific racism." The popularly appropriated if wrongly grasped concept of "fit" and "fitness" -- as in the survival of the fittest -- eventually lead to such scholarly works as The Origin of Porch Monkeys. The largest deconstruction of human narcissism since Copernicus and Galileo. Third stone from the sun, all dressed up and no place to go. Orphans long before Nietzsche broke the news about God. So of course the next step was to sort people into higher and lower, more civilized or more savage. But speaking of Nietzsche, now there was an idea! Why not start a Master Race? The Indefatigable Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and her vast influence. The Aryan race. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Rudolf Steiner's spinoff, Anthroposophy, and its survival in contemporary Waldorf Schools. Spiritualism, Mind Cure & New Thought From Phineas Parkhurst Quimby to Unity Church. to be completed... Fascist Modernism: Double Vision The funny, slightly smelly role of aestheticism. T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf. Art for the Elite's Sake. The strange story of my night at the movies. Plus, who knew that this crowd was heavy into eugenics, the occult and all sorts of weirdball spiritualism? Actually, this is quite well known in certain academic circles, but this news, for the most part, hasn't yet filtered down to us peons -- another cute aspect of the high modernist avant garde worldview. American Eugenics: Giving Comfort to the Enemy One right way. Efficiency experts and streamline design. Cold Spring Harbor Lab. Henry Ford, the Jews, and Adolph Hitler. Nazism and The Final Solution to be completed... Postwar Whitewash After WWII, much that smacked of Nazism -- Aryan this and that -- was suddenly very uncool. Yet you can walk into any Barnes & Noble store today and pick up a full set of Blavatsky's works. Or Rudolf Steiner's. Sure, you can also buy a copy of Mein Kampf, but in the latter case, Hitler isn't in the New Age section. The eugenic and racist themes of much that passes for what Border's today calls "Metaphysical Studies" are more shrouded in obfuscation than the occult codswallop in which they're embedded. Caveat emptor. Except our Mystic Bourgeoisie emptors don't seem to give a good caveat. In The Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Myths of Northern Europe former Tim Leary pal Ralph Metzner writes: "...the Nazis appropriated certain themes that they claimed to have found in Germanic myth and combined them with illusory assumptions about Aryan racial supremacy. One could say that the Nazis laid a curse on Germanic mythology." Conversely, one could say that talk about a "Germanic psyche" (p. 10) is a load of racially attuned (let's call it) Jungian bilge. "The purpose of this book is to present factual, intuitive, and spiritual evidence for the existence of a primordial Norse goddess..."		any clue's good enough to hop a train for... gravity's rainbow pynchon when the train left the station it had two lights on behind... the blue light was my baby and the red light was my mind... love in vain r. johnson / stones some of these book covers are merely here for spot color. others are highly relevant to the text. beware. here's one that will be important to the story in its later phases. The Unity Movement: Its Evolution and Spiritual Teaching beyond death: the gates of consciousness among the first glimmers of "transpersonal psychology" love at goon park harry harlow and the science of affection
The Strange Career of Self-Esteem Ayn Rand and erstwhile lover Nathaniel Branden produce The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. Branden parlayed this into his current role as the self-described "Father of the Self-Esteem Movement." 12 Steps to Solipsism: Codependency Everything is an addiction. The intense focus of relationships. The irrelevance of relationship. The ever lurking danger of The Other. Archetropes of the Elective Unconscience In Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life, Thomas Moore explicitly praises narcissism. In their rush to cash in on this publishing phenomenon, other writers of the Jungian persuasion float titles like Sacred Selfishness: A Guide to Living a Life of Substance. And various brawny lads offer self-help for accessorizing the anemic soul. Anything Celtic. Anything Gnostic. Nordic wet dreams. White is the new black yo. the brawny co-authors of King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine Pysche & Spirit: A Two-Count Bust Achieving perfection: what personality disorders? The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. World's most shallow analogy: brains are like computers. Drinking the artificial intelligence kool-aid. Get a hobby. Get a goal. Get ahead. Gone is any sense of human depth, along with any concern for past trauma, biographical or historic. Dialectic Behavior Therapy, the latest wrinkle in this context-free form of Pavlov for People combines Zen with CBT to promote that good-feel living in the now. Whatever it was, get over it. Move on. This therapy-induced amnesia is especially handy for certain forms of political reorganization focused on social fit and corporate productivity. Back Home: The Unbearable Whiteness of Boulder Don't get me wrong. Some of my best friends are white. Come to think of it, I'm white myself. Damn. I should take better advantage of my privileged position. But somehow, in Boulder, I just don't feel I've achieved the high level of whiteness I see reflected in the attitudes and random posturings of the local Burghers. And how does this relate to the foregoing? Boulder is the mother of all lodestones for the Mystic Bourgeoisie. It's not that the NewAge++ aren't well distributed -- they're everywhere -- but without living in Boulder and seeing the phenomenon up close and personal in concentrated form, I would never have begun the research for this book. Clearly, it's been an inspiring environment for our theme. "The racial makeup of the city is 88.33% White..." source: Wikipedia, from the 2000 Boulder census What Love Is: Attachment v. Spiritual Bling Bowlby, attachment "theory," etc. -- to be completed... Notes Bibliography Author Bio		one of the approximately four jillion books by the so-called father of self-esteem perhaps the cover of the French translation explains it best but wait. if Atlas Shrugged, i'd have to say our coverboy doesn't quite "get it"

author bio

Named in a 2001 Financial Times Group survey as one of the "top 50 business thinkers in the world," Christopher Locke (aka RageBoy, aka Chief Blogging Officer) is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual, and author of Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices and The Bombast Transcripts: Rants and Screeds of RageBoy®. He has worked at the Japanese government's Fifth Generation Project, at Ricoh, at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, at MCI, at IBM, as a consultant/blogger for HighBeam Research, and as a short-order cook at Nick Tahoe's Texas Hots. Locke has written for Wired, Release 1.0, The Industry Standard, Harvard Business Review and many other publications. His work has been covered by Fast Company, Advertising Age, Business Week, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, The Economist, The Financial Times, and so on. He has never recanted anything. Before now. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.